The business plans for 2011 worked out somewhat:

• QuinScape went through its wonderful tenth year and enjoyed a strong period of growth (almost +30% to 60 employees at the end of the year). I think we did a pretty decent job although as usual the things you try to focus on at the start of the year rarely are the things you work on at the end of the year. But all in all everything related to QuinScape worked out great.
• My focus on OpenSAGA did not work out as planned. 2011 was so busy that many of the strategic undertakings relating to our open source project OpenSAGA failed to get enough attention. I have talked about that in more detail in the OpenSAGA blog. One of the plans for 2012 thus is a much stronger focus on developing the OpenSAGA platform and property.

For both of these areas I managed to present on a new record number of conferences. Which was a wonderful experience and an experience I hope to extend in 2012.

My private plans didn’t hold for too long and came around different than planned (but for the better):

• While I intended to bring out ADOM for the iPad, a new release of ADOM and a completely revised edition of ADOM named iADOM (for iPhones) none of that happened. Instead something completely different and (to most folks unexpected) happened: JADE – the Java-based successor to ADOM – was finally released on my birthday and started to grow strongly from then on.
• My roleplaying interestes went through a very wild phase:

1. Hexer & Helden didn’t get much expansion. This is another area I’m going to focus on in 2012 but with a more pragmatic angle – I finally want to resume playing RPGs at a steady pace with friends and family in 2012 and if I can decide that Hexer & Helden will be the system to be used. But not much new happened to the system in 2011.
2. For a while I started writing my own pos-apocalyptic roleplaying game – Gaia Gamma. The blog was very successful for a brief moment in 2011 but then things started to falter due to JADE (see above). For now Gaia Gamma is in hibernation but I will resume it at some point.
3. Then I proceeded working on The Fantasy Game – a new attempt to re-experience the very first months of 1974, when RPGs where something completely new and exciting.
4. And in secrecy I have been developing a Shadowrun clone with awesome layout and images and the ideas to include all necessary rules in an exciting and blazing fast rules system of 128 pages DIN-A4 hard bound gaming bliss. I didn’t even start a blog for that game but like the others above I definitely want to continue working on the game at some point.

All this broke down and stopped when some day during our June holiday I wondered about what to focus on (while I noticed that I spread my resources much too wide). And the decision was easy and right from todays point of view. I decided to go for JADE and finally launch the game. Which I did (see above). Six months later I’m still having a blast every minute I can work on the game so everything feels right. More on that below.

What remains of 2011? Oh yes, my social media plans:

• By now Facebook has grown on me, more than 1.300 people have become “friends” (the majority ADOM and JADE fans) and I’m using Facebook for everyday exchanges with the JADE community. If you want to befriend me for that, feel to do so. I even managed to be the 38th most connected German person on Facebook – cute
• Twitter is something I’m still using more passively than actively. But by now I am following a lot of interesting people and Twitter finally has developed into something valuable and meaningful.

So what is going to happen in 2012?

• Business-wise the focus (once again) will be on QuinScape and OpenSAGA. OpenSAGA 2.0 is looming on the horizon and we have some big things in development for the platform. Additionally 2012 should be the year when OpenSAGA becomes a lot more user-friendly product-like platform (right now it’s something for developers). QuinScape will need to be grown (again) in a stable and controlled manner.
• Regarding my personal pleasures I intend to d a lot with JADE: JADE will see a very steady flow of updates and releases and JADE: The Ultimate Edition will be released as a business venture in very early 2012.
• Finally I want to transform Hexer & Helden into a finished game – by actually playing it!
• I want to learn and improve in speed reading… right now my standard reading speed seems to be around 320 words per minute and I want to improve this significantly. Preliminary tests already put me around 1.000 words per minute but I’m curious if this is just a trick or something I can steadily maintain.
• And I want to live through happy and wonderful times with my beloved wife, my family and all our wonderful friends and colleagues.

All in all not too different from 2011 – so I guess I manage to follow my bliss for some time now – which feels as wonderful as suggested by Joseph Campbell.

So my most important wish for 2012 is that we (and you) all remain healthy – all the rest will come from that. God bless you and I wish you all a great and wonderful 2012!

Thomas Biskup
during the last hours of 2011 in Germany
while watching “It’s A Wonderful Life” – one his most beloved movies

(click to enlarge)

While Gaia Gamma seems to be working out very nicely (and there still are 33 slots as of now that can win a free print version of Gaia Gamma once it’s done) I thought a lot about the old school renaissance in roleplaying and started to fiddle with the original D&D rules. The result is yet another blog called The Fantasy Game, which tries to rebuild the original white box rules in a cleaned and streamlined format. The important idea here is to keep to the three little brown books of the white box and just modify the game in such places where later house rules by the creators implied an obvious wish for improvement.

Updates there won’t happen quite as often as for Gaia Gamma but it seems that May is going to be a pen & paper RPG design month for me.

It’s an interesting experience as I never before have participated in such a EU event. Since I’m also going to be interviewed for

Side note: The drive to Brussels was annoying – I still do not understand the new traffic system around Eindhoven and again and again am caught on one of those endless roads without exists. All traffic signs seem to be rather meaningless. If someone from Eindhoven reads this – I really would like to understand the new trafficways around Eindhoven – is there a manual there? We again lost 90 minutes… just because we got lost.

This got me thinking: Why the hack do I start new projects all the time? Instead of finishing the running ones (spell: iADOM, ADOM Live, JADE, Hexer & Helden).

I pretty quickly got to an answer… and I am happy to report that it’s not “I’m getting too old and senile to focus any longer” I guess there is a very simple reason behind this: I have always been a creative person and whenever the creative juices start to flow I need some outlet. Since I am interested in many topics I also fiddle with many things. Which leads to many projects. An interesting insight for me was to finally understand why the programming projects always are taking a back place quickly to the newest fad I’m burning for: I just feel that in the very little quality hobby time I have (compared to my times as e.g. a student where 90% of the time was quality hobby time) I nowadays just don’t like the thought to spend a whole evening debugging some code just to be able to get a minor feature running. One evening is a lot of time and writing non-software related things just has a higher “quality input to quality output” rate than programming.

Now if someone has a good idea on how I might be able to fund projects via Kickstarter (lacking a US bank account) this at least would mean that I easily might get motivated into finally finishing the ADOM pen & paper RPG since that would combine two beloved hobbies of mine – RPG design and ADOM. Suggestions welcome.

For ADOM Live I have decided to stay with iOS and the iPhone as my primary platform. Despite quite a few folks asking for Android as being the preferred platform.

Why? Several reasons mostly centering about one core argument:

I am interested in the commercial success of the project and my guts tell me that Android so far is a huge commercial failure for developers.

Your mileage may vary and I would love to hear about it. So please give me your opinions – not your flames Here is my line of reasoning:

• Using iOS I basically have to support one unified hardware platform (ok, two resolutions if I limit myself to the iPhone, one more if including the iPad – but with a unified infrastructure). With Android I have a huge amount of different mobile devices and I remember very well the hassles required to support ADOM on Windows, Mac, BeOS, Linux, etc. Screen resolutions, etc. are a nightmare – especially on a mobile device with limited screen real estate and the customer expectation to really get beautiful and shiny apps.
• Using iOS I usually can rely on the latest version of iOS as Apple is pretty persistent about getting its users updated to the latest stuff. With Android there seems to be a vastly varied market with various versions of Android floating around – all more or less modified by the mobile device producers. Resulting in a market were you just can go for the smallest common denominator if you really want to reap the benefits of the platform and not just of the most successful mobile device(s) on it.
• I somehow feel that the Android PR machine is trying to trick me. Consider this: Apple obviously is pretty frank with its sales numbers and successes: According to the latest numbers Apple is vastly successful, primarily because of its iOS platform – a record revenue of $26.74 billion and record net quarterly profit of $6 billion. Google reported a revenue of about $8.44 billion and a net income of about $2.54 billion. Just think about these numbers: While the margins of Google obviously are much better, the profit of Apple is pretty close to the overall revenue of Google (ok, about 75%). Apple is earning loads of money with the iOS infrastructure, Google is only talking about the number of mobile devices shipped with Android. And that’s were my guts are telling me: The platform might be a success concerning that one single statistic. But what about the interesting ones? Earnings on selling the platform? The business model for the platform? App earnings concerning the platform? I have to admit that so far I searched only for about an hour and got sidetracked, but the only statements concerning these statistics I could find where older stuff from 2009 (e.g. http://larvalabs.com/blog/iphone/android-market-sales/) and some more recent and pretty imprecise statements from the beginning of 2011 (like e.g. http://www.enternet.org/3543741/google-not-happy-with-dawdling-android-app-sales/ and http://www.techradar.com/news/software/applications/google-disappointed-with-android-app-sales-923912). Hardly a fair evaluation but software development quite often for me is about gut feelings Back to my original point…
• Apple customers are accustomed to paying money for the devices and apps. And they also are accustomed to not taking the cheapest offer. Whenever I talk to Android supporters it’s always about “being free”. Which is extremely important. But which doesn’t help a commercial developer if you have to market something to a community base that wants most of their things for free.

So in the end it comes down to two points for me:

1. Apple (at least for now) seems to have a much stronger commercial infrastructure up and running. Which potentially means higher sales to me.
2. Apple has a lot more unified device infrastructure. Which means a lot less in costs and effort for me.

So please let me know your views – and if you have facts and figures to back them up so much the better. I would love to see more information about the hard facts.

As a side note concering iOS development I also have decided to stay with MonoTouch as my primary development platform for several reasons:

• MonoTouch allows me to use C#. C# is a modern programming language with all the efficient features from annotations to great library support for about everything.
• C# feels extremely similar to Java. For me coming from 14+ years of Java development this is a great benefit as I felt comfortable in the language after about a day. I tried Objective-C and I simply despaired. As far as I am concerned it’s an ugly language and it has a half-assed memory management (come on – I have programmed C for 10+ years I can live very well with doing everything myself – even if it cuts overall development speed significantly… but having to find with a weird mixture of reference counting and manual memory handling is about the worst thing I have ever seen).
• MonoDroid is a potential way to move my apps natively to Android should I become interested in that.
• MonoTouch has close native integration (e.g. it is compiled to Objective-C which then is compiled to binary) which IMHO is so much better than using some kind of HTML/JavaScript framework for anything else but trivial CRUD applications.

So there you are. Please give me your insights, opinions and feedback and not just flames ). I’m really thinking a lot about the whole issue and would like to become enlightened by other peoples opinions.

iNuke is a great fun app that allows you to apply all kind of damaging tools to your iPhone screen – from hammers to machine guns. It is just too much fun to give your iPhone to someone who wants to have a look at it (and doesn’t know much about iPhones), activating iNuke beforehand with hammer tool and watch the shocked expression when the display splinters at first touch – remember to take a photo of your screen beforehand though

That’s about all to say about iNuke – fun, efficient and new tools of destruction already are on the horizont – try it out !

Business wise two projects will take up all my time in 2011:

• My job as one of three CEOs of QuinScape and the continuous growth of the company as a leader in web based process optimization applications.
• As an extension of QuinScape will be heavily involved in growing our open source project OpenSAGA (German, English). If you are tired of endless web frameworks that just rehash existing technologies and feel like trying something completely new – give it a try. OpenSAGA IMHO finally manages to separate business concerns from technology issues and fuels a much saner approach to web development.

Additionally there are various private projects that I finally want to push ahead:

• My plans for ADOM (Ancient Domains Of Mystery) have been explained in the official ADOM blog.
• My plans for the first German old school roleplaying game “Hexer & Helden” have been explained in the official Hexer & Helden blog.

Finally I have decided to realign my social networking activities:

• From now on I will use my Xing account for all my business activities. So if you want to socialize in business related manners you should connect to me on Xing. Using Xing for business for me also means that you won’t see much activity there during holidays.
• Twitter will continue to be used for casual chatter… mixing all kinds of stuff ranging from private observations over technical information to the latest updates about my pet projects.
• And I’m finally active on Facebook – for now I plan to use Facebook mostly for my hobby and private projects – so if you want to meet me in private Facebook is the place to go. Currently I focus on rebuilding my ADOM community connection with Facebook and am very happy with that.

So that’s it. I wish everyone out there a good start into 2011 and hope to chat with you concerning one or more of the projects mentioned above in the future. See ya till then!

Why MonoTouch you might ask? I just despise Objective-C and feel like I’m getting too old to learn any more stupid languages. Objective-C just feels too “before yesterday” for me and the way Apple decided to handle memory management with this extremely weird reference counting stuff totally annoys me… I never seem to remember if any references are left or not and my time is too limited to waste hours and hours searching memory problems. Give me C any time over Objective-C – at least I’m in complete control with C

Or give me something better… and since Java is not available for iPhones (yet?) I decided to wet my hands on C# and learn a bit about “the other folks not doing Java” are programming.

Actually I find C# a decent language although I have to wonder about a few of the naming conventions used in the language design (more on that maybe in another post if I feel like it). But it’s nice and it feels much better than Objective-C. MonoTouch and MonoDevelop also seem to be quite decent although I miss quite a number of the advanced Eclipse features from my Java real life (especially the refactoring support and the more advanced syntax checks) but it’s okay and much better (for me) than Objective-C.

After some bungling around and getting lost a few times I finally managed to get my game setup working and graphics now appear on the screen. Compared to my attempts with Objective-C I also understand how things click together (and completely ignore the Interface Builder so far since I never seem to get the hang of what is happening in the background). I love MonoTouch for its conciseness and brevity.

And I chuckle about the fact that my first generic library for my planned game is a Curses emulation Weird for such a modern system and I wonder what Apple is going to say about it… but since my first game idea is related to ADOM (very closely) I just need that Curses thingy

…the following opportunities still exist:

• OpenRheinRuhr conference in Oberhausen on saturday, the 13th – starting at 1:30pm I am going to present our ongoing OpenSAGA open source project (german, english). The german page already contains the links to OpenSAGA 1.5 milestone 1 – we did not yet get around to update the english pages.
• Talk #1 at 10:15am at W-JAX 2010 in Munich on wednesday, the 17th, where I am going to talk about my views on how the next generation of progrmaming languages really should look like (I personally believe that Scala, Closure, etc. are just more or less boring variations of a theme we have seen often enough – we need something new).
• Talk #2 at 7:30pm at W-JAX 2010 where I am going to show OpenSAGA in a live hacking session (and hopefully won’t blame myself or the project too much – but it’s the first live hacking session I will be doing ever).

See ya!